Daggerheart

One of the more interesting things I have heard about the upcoming Daggerheart is that one of the first steps is to define your world. You do not get every lineage and background in every world! If your world is just "frog people" and "bird people," that is it; no Tieflings and Dragonkin are running around in there.

Finally. A fantasy game that gets it and isn't a sticky ball of everything, plus the next 100 lineages the publisher can put out over 10 years. Monsters are hopefully the same way; you could likely omit dragons if you don't want them, or say dragons are the only monsters in the world. A lot of fantasy movies are just "humans and dragons" as the only inhabitants and monsters in the world, and a game that sets up that "design space" is a nice thing to see.

In fact, this is just like GURPS.

GURPS also does this "design your world" step first. This is also why GURPS is far less played, since every option you need to DIY yourself, while Daggerheart gives you premade choices. Very few people have the time or imagination to create a whole world from scratch. This is why Dungeon Fantasy is a popular variant of GURPS; a lot is premade for you. There are also projects out there to bring kitchen sink fantasy monsters and races to GURPS, which are great projects and benefits to the community.

I have always had a problem with choice paralysis. I can have so many games on my shelves that I play none of them. I get this with fantasy games as well, give me too many choices, and it gets harder for me to sort through and use all the character options the game gives me. If I play fantasy, I narrow down the choices and focus my world on the best of the best, given the story. If all my world needs are orcs, ogres, and goblins, why am I including kobolds, gnolls, bugbears, and 101 similarly functional humanoid lineages? At a conceptual level, they are different-shaped things that serve the same role.

Once I set up "Vikings versus Orcs," that is it. Throwing Giants, planar monsters, demons, or Drow elves in the mix messes the whole story up.

I make the same world-building and genre definition choices as Daggerheart does in my GURPS games. I like doing that since it makes my game concept stronger. I'm not worrying about the 499 other monsters in the book and how they fit in, and I can conceptualize and tell stories better in a smaller world with fewer conflicts.

It is nice to see more worldbuilding as the first step in the game, and D&D and even Pathfinder are moving away from DIY worlds and forcing you more and more to play in the officially supported setting. This is also why I prefer Tales of the Valiant over D&D, there isn't all the "product identity" in the generic fantasy ToV game. I can create a generic fantasy world with a defined story in ToV far easier than I can in D&D. And Daggerheart is following that model.

Tales of the Valiant can inherit choice paralysis quite quickly if you buy the spell and monster expansion books that Kobold Press put out for 5E. They have about 2,000 monsters for the system these days, and over 1,000 spells. ToV is massive with the additional books for 5E. Even with all those, my world is mine, and I am free to ignore all that.

GURPS is also as generic or specific a fantasy setting as you want it to be. The only difference is that GURPS is a lower-level design language of a game, while ToV and Daggerheart give you many premade choices and an easier starting path.

Something about Daggerheart reminds me of the Cypher System. I have a strange feeling that the games have a similar design mechanic, as Cypher System does many narrative pools and tools for both players and referees to use, along with meta-concepts such as "GM Intrusions" and players spending XP to alter the narrative.

Like Daggerheart, Cypher uses a "pick-based" character design system, where you say you are an X who does Y because of Z, such as "I am a Rugged Warrior who Controls Beasts." Daggerheart puts choices like those on cards and lets you combine them like Cypher does.

I hope this game does well; it's nice to see a rules-medium, narrative-focused game with narrative pool mechanics come out. While I love GURPS, there needs to be more fantasy games than just D&D for streamers to tell stories with, and the "Critical Role" style is what drives a lot of interest in the hobby. They have a complete SRD and free resources to download, so they are being overly generous to give themselves the best chance to grab a following.

Many YouTube D&D channels are struggling, as YouTube is instructing them to explore other subjects. Daggerheart should take off and replace D&D for many of these groups, giving them new life in their channels. D&D is such an elephant in the room that the hobby would be better served by having different games diversifying interest and live-play shows. If Daggerheart can revive fantasy live-plays, that is a good thing, even for GURPS, since interest in live plays does have crossover.

I wish them luck and hope the streaming shows playing this game take off. It would be beneficial for the hobby to have more games that people play, rather than relying on the default D&D.

And, of course, I hope there are more GURPS live plays, too.

The Weird Fantasy Genre

With weird fantasy, one of the best games that tries to dive into it is the great Dungeon Crawl Classics game. The dungeon is not supposed to be "the normal," as entering the dungeon is more like Alice stepping into the looking glass. This is the upside-down world, where nothing should work or seem normal, and a place apart from reality, like a near-death perception-altered experience.

D&D 5E turns dungeons into video-game levels, boards in a strategy guide to clear. This comes from D&D 4E, which is why modern Wizards D&D is not D&D. The classic D&D experience is defined by that "Beyond the Looking Glass" dungeon crawl, of a dungeon master using their twisted imagination to create an out-of-body experience in other players' head spaces.

I have had my 5E groups go through a dungeon without fear. All my AD&D groups had fear.

Making D&D into "influencer fantasy" with slavish influencer art and the yoke of nostalgia guts the game's spirit and power. Wall Street has stripped D&D of its identity. D&D 2024 is not D&D. It is a tabletop game influenced by Diablo IV.

Is it fun? Yes. Like a video game is fun.

Dungeon Crawl Classics tries to achieve this by using strange dice and random charts, but the charts ultimately define and limit the experience. True out-of-body existential discovery and horror cannot happen if everyone knows the results on the charts.

The charts will prevent you from truly discovering and realizing what we all once knew with these games in the 1980s. The Satanic Panic happened because more and more people were being enlightened (look up the late-80s enlightenment movements, like crystal therapy, and so on), and AD&D 2nd Edition was created to put the genie back in the bottle. Wall Street stopped mass spiritual enlightenment in 1989 when D&D was at its height of cultural influence.

Note: This is not what I actually believe, but to get in touch with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, this is where your thinking has to go. A game is a game, but many in spiritual movements latched onto AD&D as a transcendental tool. Religious groups responded to this and pushed back. 

To get into the proper gonzo mindset, you must free yourself from the idea that tabletop games are simple replacements for video games (2000-2020) or consumer-driven, identitarian lifestyle gaming (2021-present). When you feel "the game is more than just a game," then you have the proper mindset. 

All that sounds crazy, but trying to understand that concept and theory will put your mind in the correct mode to run weird fantasy games. This is not just a video game with goofy stuff or some superhero power fantasy where you are "meant to kill the monsters." Kitchen sink fantasy, while fun, ultimately leads to "videogame-ism" and puts you into a mindset where you will never reach this higher state of enlightenment.

Wall Street took over D&D and made it "safe" again. Even DCC refuses to go to some places, and keeps itself safe for every audience. The collection of things considered to be in "kitchen sink" fantasy shrinks as controversial topics are bleached from the genre, such as half-races and succubi. And stale and controlled is what most of today's "gonzo fantasy" becomes. It is a commoditized fantasy, featuring goofy elements like silly hats, big mustaches, talking bananas, and strangely drawn art. You get the visuals right, but not the heart and soul.

With kitchen-sink fantasy, I love how familiar it is, but the world it creates feels like any version of D&D. Gonzo goes a step beyond that. For me, it is a starting place, a doorway to that more enlightened, mind-altering, and almost spiritual place. It is the "normal" from which we jump into the "abnormal."

True gonzo fantasy is like stepping through the Looking Glass.

Part of me dislikes the kitchen-sink genre since it leans too hard on D&D's tropes. Our games become nothing more than "D&D simulators" compared to our stories and imagination. Yes, they are D&D simulators coaxed in realism, but GURPS can do so much more than power a simulator.

Shadowdark does a little better, and it "gets" what the dungeon should be, if in an abstract form, where "the dark" is a powerful, evil, irrational metaphysical force that wants to consume the party and all that is good. We are making progress, but we are not yet where we need to be.

However, Shadowdark also begins with a more humanistic and ordinary world. We can't enter an altered state of heightened perception if we start out in that "101 fantasy races eating cupcakes in a town" mess of fantasy art we get in D&D 2024 these days, which looks more like a Target ad than it does D&D art. We must start with a more "our world" humanistic, grounded base to get that stark difference and experience that perception shift.

These people playing as anthropomorphic dragons or gentrified orcs will never experience a heightened reality because identity swapping dulls their experience and senses. You are so focused on your new self that you never see the outside or witness the stark differences between realities. If a human begins to change into a dragon, that is special. Who cares if you get to start as one and be the same as everyone else?

In GURPS, we have tools to help us journey towards true, authentic, pre-1989 weird fantasy thinking. One of the best is GURPS Cabal, designed for more conspiracy-minded campaigns and urban mysteries. But trying to imagine all these strange planes and dimensions intermixing with a medieval world where they don't even know science yet...

They can't even explain combustion or bacteria. How will they understand a strange point in space where two dimensions cross and the rules of how the world works are entirely different in one or more ways? What happens when a figment of a reality comes close to our own and only affects one aspect of mental perception? There could be a place where you try to write in your native language, and all that comes out is strange alien gibberish.

This place will never be explained, and you will never tell the characters the real reason why. They may never figure out the worlds they inhabit. We have enough trouble in this world trying to figure out the unexplained. Imagine a world of myth, trying to make sense of it all.

Of course, players forget history in modern gaming, and fantasy worlds are just Ren Faire-dressed modern worlds. Of course, these worlds have scientific knowledge because ...magic! GURPS players know about and respect Tech Level, so you will find a player base here with a more profound understanding of history and the progression of technology.

Another great resource is GURPS Powers: The Weird, which initially explores the concept of weird science. However, the later chapters touch on topics discussed in the Cabal book and delve into this genre's power types and sources. You get some great power ideas that places, people, or monsters could have, such as illusions that can heal or harm, scale adjustment, and other strange, mind-altering ones that break your perceptions of reality.

Mix all this with GURPS Fantasy (or Dungeon Fantasy), and try introducing "the weird" into a game world. Don't make "everyday magic" a part of the world; keep wizards and other casters mysterious and rare. Magic is not understood, accepted, or a technology metaphor. It is not used in everyday life by everyone. Magic can be feared as "something that steals your soul" - even if you rely on it for convenience. Wizards must keep their work secret for fear that someone may stab them in the back for being a devil worshipper.

Then, introduce the weird.

Make the population fearful. Make the strange happening truly strange and not reproducible by "simple magic." Something else is going on here. You will begin to experience the reality warping sensation of seeing characters deal with something they can't explain, and their players can't either. What do you do next if you can't explain it, dispel it, understand it with divination, go into a dungeon and turn it off, or wish it away? D&D assumes you have perfect knowledge and control of your world, and that everything on the spell and power lists will be able to solve every problem in the universe.

This is how it was with AD&D for us, of which the excellent Adventures Dark and Deep is my stepping stone. When we entered that dungeon as characters, we felt like we were stepping out of this dimension and into another. There was a transcendental experience that was more than playing a video game or running a simulation. The dungeon door was the portal to another universe. Today, the above game carries on that mantle.

GURPS was created in that era. When we played GURPS, we stepped out of this world and into another on a different path, but it was there. This was when we stepped into another world entirely, created using the alchemical parameters of the game, and felt like we were somewhere else. While in AD&D, the dungeon served as a metaphor for moving into another reality, in GURPS, entering a world nobody had ever seen before was referred to as a "dimension shift."

GURPS is the more mind-expanding game, and it doesn't need the dungeon metaphor for the shift.

But you still need to build the grounding metaphors, establish the parts of the everyday world to relate to, and then contrast the differences between the world we perceive and the one we cannot.

GURPS = Easiest Realism Fantasy

The common theme of many realism fantasy games is how hard they make everything, especially character creation. I took a trip into Rolemaster recently, and while the charts and game are cool, the character creation bogs the system down with a lot of unneeded math and crunch. GURPS is relatively straightforward in comparison.

Realism fantasy is different from deadly or gritty fantasy because there is an assumption that combat will be detailed with realistic effects of damage applied. Shadowdark is a deadly and gritty fantasy game. Still, since it uses the 5E engine, Shadowdark is not necessarily realistic, and it takes more work and referee assumptions to get there since the game does not give you the simulation systems you need for a realistic fantasy game.

Shadowdark is very gritty and deadly, but it does not give me the tools to run a game with a high amount of realism, nor does it give the players that much to work with in terms of skills and combat options to have the things they need to reciprocate and solve problems realistically.

Shadowdark is more of a board game than a simulation. GURPS is more of a simulation.

There is some cosmic war between Rolemaster and GURPS, of which I am unaware. Regardless, the system's goals in the fantasy genre are very close to providing gritty, deadly, realistic, skill-based fantasy play. GURPS has better combat options and fewer charts, whereas Rolemaster has the crit charts. GURPS can be played from a character sheet, whereas Rolemaster can't.

Rolemaster makes these internal assumptions that guide certain races and heritages, making certain professions and skills easier for those backgrounds. The game builds a "hidden" set of best paths and ideal combinations into character creation and advancement methods. In a sense, this is the game's "traditional fantasy cred," where dwarves don't make great wizards, and the other sets of fantasy tropes are created through the game's character system.

GURPS has none of that. You play as a zero-based human or a racial fantasy template and begin designing for it or adding templates until you are done. Unless you put them in there, the game has no internal assumptions of who can be the best at what. If you wanted dwarves to be unable to use arcane magic, put that in the dwarven racial template for your world as a disadvantage.

Playing a gritty, realistic fantasy game is far easier in GURPS than in any other system. The "critical effects" can be mostly made up on the spot and become readily apparent with high damage rolls. Do 20 points of damage to a head with a warhammer, and it is easy to describe what happens without flipping through 50 pages of charts. The same goes for melee critical misses, and spell critical hits and failures.

And for spell corruption, I could tag that system as a Modifier as a Limitation, tag it with Unreliable (16+ for -5%, or just say critical misses), and then put a corruption (or divine disfavor) mechanic on there for another -15%, and take -20% off the cost of all spells and spell-like powers (non-serious and temporary effect would likely reduce this down to a -10%). Or I could "say it is so," ignore the design system, and say this is like GURPS Horror. There are dozens of ways to do this, all of which are valid if you are consistent.

I have an imagination; I don't need all these charts. Are they inspiring? Yes. Are they required to play? No, and the character can limit your imagination by making you dependent on them.

Psychological limitations and those internal battles also play a considerable role in realistic fantasy, and GURPS delivers those with the game. The social factors play into the game as much as the skills and abilities, giving me a much stronger game than just providing characters and crit charts. Of course, Rolemaster is more than just those parts; GURPS has all the pieces I need built into the game's core, and they work the same for any genre or setting.

GURPS gets me to realistic fantasy nirvana more easily than any other game. Once people understand character creation, everything else is easy and flows logically. I don't need to learn a new system to do this, either, or support a game like Dungeon Crawl Classics that requires a few dozen dice to play and players constantly asking, "What do I roll?"'

With GURPS, I have that game.

GURPS Combat

The GURPS for Dummies book is still one of the best casual references to the rules ever written. It strips down the complexity of the rules and makes much of the game more accessible and easier to think about. After reading this book, superpowers and other special abilities became much easier to use in the game. I gave this book to a friend, and the game became clearer for her, creating excitement for playing the game.

After she had read the character creation chapters, she was not intimidated by character creation and started coming up with great ideas for the characters. Yes, you can do that in GURPS. In 5E, there is at least sixty dollars for that one character option you want in a 300-page hardcover. After she read GURPS, she shared my opinion that the entire D&D market is a rip-off designed to pull thousands of dollars out of each player. GURPS is a bargain compared to a 5E habit; you can do much more with it, and it is a far better game for creative types.

That won't sit well with her D&D group, but at least she is out of Plato's Cave.

This is the best book to give to borderline GURPS players who are interested but sit in the "where do I start?" camp. She wants to get her own copy. The book lightly touches on many areas, so it is not an in-depth replacement for the core books, but it touches on the best places in each chapter and gets you interested in exploring more.

If there were ever a second revision, I would love a section in each chapter telling you "where to look for more" and giving an overview of advanced options, including links to other books in the series.

Combat is also an area this book covers well and demystifies. One key omission is the shock rule (B381), which you must use if you are into moderately advanced combat. It is mentioned in the section on disadvantages, but not in the combat chapter under damage. Pencil that in!

GURPS combat is better than Rolemaster's. Once you play with all the advanced wounding rules, crippling, knockdown, stun, shock, damage modifiers, blunt trauma, injury levels, wounds, unliving modifiers (zombies, golems, etc.), and critical hits - you have a game that can produce all of Rolemaster's chart results without the charts. If you want to be extra descriptive, buy an anatomy book and know when a femur or scapula can be broken. It takes a little extra effort when a target takes damage, but I would rather have a system that can recreate those results without needing charts and works for any target type.

You can also play with basic combat: hit plus damage. Rolemaster does not scale or simplify as well, and if all you want to play is "roll to-hits and do damage" - just like in any d20 game - that is an option. It is nice to have a combat system where you can shift from "it doesn't matter, handle it quickly" to "full bore wounding and realism" in the drop of a hat.

GURPS has an internal rules flexibility that most other games dream they could have.

Want to say "a month goes by, give me a skill roll for constructing the cabin" to "every second matters, your life depends on it?" GURPS does that seamlessly, and with as many levels of detail as you want.

GURPS vs. Realism Fantasy

There is a genre of dungeon-crawling games that relies on high-simulation elements, such as Rolemaster United (RMU), and in a roundabout way, Dungeon Crawl Classics with its rudimentary "crit charts" for warriors and other classes. A few other games try to walk the realism route, but none does it as well as GURPS. Where RMU models weapon attacks versus armor, GURPS models damage types after they penetrate armor. RMU requires a chart for each weapon and a crit table for each damage type.

GURPS is less descriptive but just as deadly. Still, it is not hard to make up descriptions of damage types and special effects, especially if the damage goes overkill. Hits to the arm or hand may cause someone to make a DX roll to avoid dropping a held item. Face hits may damage teeth, eyes, ears, or the nose. Blood may get in an enemy's eyes. A hit to the leg could cause a target to lose balance.

Most crit charts can be replaced with imaginative referee rules.

These rulings will be more logically consistent and appropriate than a chart will force on you.

Your crit effects will be better than the ones in the book and will also reflect the reality you are trying to make happen in your game. Doing slapstick comedy? The orc's pants drop and reveal underwear with hearts all over it, and he trips and falls over. Doing gritty realism? You stab the orc in the eye.

It is the same with "magical mishaps" in many of these games, and being forced to roll on corruption charts that could have tentacles popping from the wizard's body. Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, and Warhammer FRP all do this. In GURPS, you can critically fail a spell roll. Guess what? Make up an effect.

You can and will do better than any of these charts.

90% of the time, the corruption or mishap effect will be better than anything you can find on a chart in these games. You will miss out on the WTF ones that don't make sense, but if you open up your imagination and think just a little, you could do better than any of the charts in these games.

You could go subtle, like townspeople start acting strangely around your wizard, or you could go freak-gonzo and have your caster grow demon horns. You could roll a reaction roll to see how subtle or severe the effect will be, if you don't have a clue. You could even do things not on the charts, like warp reality and move a door from one side of the hall to another, and mess with the player's minds. When the characters exit the dungeon, they will find that the entire dungeon has moved 1,000 miles to the north. Maybe a group or retainers they never hired is waiting for them outside the dungeon and asking for a treasure cut. Perhaps the town they came from, they went back to, and discovered it was destroyed 100 years ago.

I told you that you can do better than the charts that ship with these games.

Your imagination is 1,000 times better. Don't buy games primarily intended for people who don't have vivid imaginations, and expect the book's limited subset of random chart results to be better than yours.

And trust yourself.

If your "crit result" or "corruption effect" does not seem "as good as one in a book," then tell yourself that your imagination will always be better than what someone else can come up with. If you doubt your idea, roll one die, and make it a 50-50 chance you use it or come up with something else. Come up with two and roll between them; it is either a bleed effect of the leg, or you cut the orc's boot laces off, and a piece of footwear flies off (possibly hitting a nearby goblin in the face).

None of the charts in these other games likely have that boot crit, but that happens in combat. I just made it up. It is just as valid a result as anything in those games.

Some of the charts in these games are interesting, such as random tavern names and other miscellanea. Those are mostly useful and fun idea generators. Charts that affect gameplay or limit critical effects and failures to a subset of results should be scrutinized as possible replacements for your imagination.

Link Updates

Some site news for the sidebar links today.

The GURPS Character Assistant ($16) was updated to the correct link.

I added the new sewn-binding hardcover links for the two main GURPS 4th Edition books to the Buy GURPS section. These look very nice, and it's cool to see GURPS core books getting a serious upgrade. I also added the format of the GURPS products in the links, whether physical or PDF.

Nosh Solo is a new GURPS content creator on YouTube! Let's show some support, subscribe to our GURPS content creators, and say hello! I added his channel to the YouTube section.

I love my link sidebar. It is my Grand Central Station for all things GURPS, and it lets me explore and quickly find my most-used pages and sites. I have some good stuff on there and keep returning to these links.

My most-used link is my YouTube Search link, which takes me to the latest YouTube videos that mention GURPS. I like this better than logging into YouTube and seeing what they recommend; that recommended list has become pure clickbait pop-culture slop these days, and they rarely give me GURPS videos first.

When I want to see GURPS, I need a link that takes me straight to the good stuff.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #3

The conversion for GURPS Star Frontiers is still coming along, and I am still working through the equipment list. Some items, like the gas mask and life jacket, come from other GURPS gear lists. The equipment list is elementary, but with a few unique items. Many items seem stuck in time, like they were pulled from an 1980 Sears catalog with camping supplies, so this is a retro-future game. No one would notice if I added a thermos, portable cooler, and survival stove to this list.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note I am using GURPS Ultra Tech power cells. The 20 SEU power clip in Star Frontiers is directly equivalent to the C Cell in GURPS, and in our game, we had "mini power clips" and "micro." The GURPS rules have these, so it is easier to use the GURPS cells and have a wider variety of batteries for power items since no one is sticking a pistol-clip-sized battery in their watch.

You can call the C Cell a "power clip," but it is still a C Cell.

A "power belt pack?" A plastic battery case with a D Cell, belt hooks, and a few power ports. The "power backpack?" The same thing, but with an E Cell in a backpack harness.

I have the doze grenade in there but have not vectored out the effects. This will require a designed superpower-style effect. It is funny how every "standard equipment pack" comes with a single gas grenade that puts people to sleep and a spray hypodermic, which is essentially a reusable syringe. If we were talking "what we know today," then every dose of a drug would be its own single-use injector. A "stim dose" should be one plastic, self-injecting, single-use dose.

But remember, we are stuck in the 1980s here with this game. It is too easy to say everything is this hyper-slick "Iron Man tech" where helmets nano assemble and every piece of gear looks super modern and sleek. That is modernist garbage, Unreal Engine 5 asset flips, 3d Studio Max sci-fi items, and VFX slop. Not everything has to "look and feel" like super-science modern tech. You will lose what makes the original setting special and extraordinary.

We will stick to the spray hypo and single-dose cartridges.

We saw the original Traveller turn into Mega Traveller, and they did the same modernization. Back then, we said the entire game looked "California-ized." We loved the retro-1950s original look and feel of 70s Traveller, and to see the game turned into modern sci-fi made it feel like the game lost something. Computers weighed tons, and could never be carried around with you. You radioed back to the ship if you wanted someone to look up something from the ship's database.

If we want the game to feel as it did, we are sticking to the retro-future, early-80s pastiche, cut off at 1982. Even Aliens is out since it is from the late 80s, along with Return of the Jedi from 83. We are stuck with Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Tron, E.T., The Thing, Flash Gordon, Logan's Run, UFO, and Blade Runner. There are some Roger Corman films here, as well as Thundarr and Planet of the Apes.

Also, note that in Star Frontiers, there is a subspace radio. This is faster than light communication, at 1 LY per hour. This changes a lot, and news can spread quickly in this universe, with most planets learning of major news within a day. Distress calls can be "phoned home" to planets. The consequences of this were never explored in the game, so to keep lore-accurate, there needs to be a strict rule for the limits and capabilities of communication in this universe.

In GURPS-speak, Star Frontiers is closer to a tech level 7+2, like Tales of the Solar Patrol, a 6+3 setting.

GURPS Holds Playability

GURPS is a system I can return to, and it is instantly playable. With many other games, it takes time to get up to speed, and I fumble through mechanics when I feel the system should flow naturally. Even though the system complexity is moderate, getting back into GURPS feels like putting on a glove you have broken in and that fits you perfectly.

Once you know the system, it is as easy to slip back into as any older edition of B/X D&D.

The generic nature of GURPS means it can adopt the flavor of any setting you put it in, and it feels like "the game." With Savage Worlds, everything I put that system in feels more pulp and action-oriented. I can play Miami Vice and the classic Warhammer Fantasy setting in GURPS and Savage Worlds. With GURPS, they feel more like themselves. With Savage Worlds, they feel more like Savage Worlds. I love Savage Worlds, but that pulp-action feeling tends to seep into the setting, changing how players approach problems, especially combat.

Combat in Savage Worlds has a "fun factor" that I don't want in either of those settings to have that feeling. I know you can do a more gritty and deadly Savage Worlds, but that "fast, furious, fun" design turns my Savage Worlds games into shoot fests. That said, Savage Worlds is another of those "fits like a glove" systems for me, but it has a distinct movie-like style and play that is fun, but not for every setting.

Other games, such as 5E, require a lot of "content sorting" since they are unplayable with more than two shelves of books and expansions. Pathfinder 2 falls into the same area for me; I can't "break into" this game as I keep stumbling over the constant book references and chains of tags. Rolemaster is another challenging game; the charts and math drag down character creation. I want to get into these games, but the amount of homework I need to do, plus the difficulty of character creation, makes them white elephants for me. I keep them around, always want to play them, and end up disappointed that I never have the time to.

But all these games come with a "preset style of play" - just like Savage Worlds. Warhammer Fantasy is grim and gritty. D&D 5E is high-fantasy superheroes. Pathfinder 2 is a fantasy tactical map combat game. Rolemaster is a realistic fantasy game with preset "best paths" to discover. Dungeon Crawl Classics is D&D 3.5E light, packed with gonzo art and effect tables. AD&D is the classic, deadly dungeon-crawling game.

GURPS can be any and all of these.

And it is so easy to slip back into GURPS and pick up where I left off. The language of the game is consistent and straightforward. The writing is excellent. The systems are the best-designed in gaming. They don't need to change. I am back in the game once I have those three dice in my hand.

GURPS is a nirvana, a blank sheet of paper that becomes anything you put on it. To the uninitiated, a blank paper is nothing, bland, and nothingness. To those who can see the potential and use creativity, a blank sheet of paper is infinite possibilities.

I can use GURPS to create anything.

It will have any feeling or style I want, whether pulp, gritty, realistic, lighthearted, high-action, horror, speculative, strange, gonzo, comedy, or any other style and look that I can imagine.

Time Off

I am still here, just storing books and moving a few I want to look at again. I play more than just GURPS; having that perspective is good. I also write on a few related blogs, SBRPG being the most frequently updated, and it reflects the current state of my most-played game shelves.

GURPS is still on those.

The Star Frontiers project continues, but the original Star Frontiers game does not translate well to GURPS. The original SF game is 1d100, and the weapon damages don't make much sense. What GURPS does in its science fiction implementation works much better, except for starship combat. When GURPS tries to go into a hardcore math and physics simulation, it gets tedious, dull, and my eyes glaze over. I still have some design thoughts and soul-searching to do here, most importantly, what is the project's goal, and what do I want it to do?

A Star Law game will be different than a UPF game, the same way a PGC explorer's game will be different than a space pirate game.

Star Frontiers never became much more than its original module series set on Volturnus, a sort of John Carter of Mars imitation, and the original game would have been better had it focused on that aspect. I would rather have the four races send their cryo-sleep starships to Volturnus, focus on settling that planet as the campaign's hub world, ignore the sample universe, and tell referees to "make up the rest of the universe themselves."

The game had other adventure modules, but few compared to this original series.

The comparison between John Carter of Mars and Volturnus does not go away for me; the first adventures were classics and delivered on that genre excellently. The "outside universe," being something everyone felt they needed to escape to, felt like a false god, and when you finally did, players quickly discovered there was nothing much out there.

Volturnus had "dirty influences" like space pirates (you could never steal their ships) and other outside influences, but I feel the series could have been much more and never got there. Selling something that wasn't Star Wars in the 1980s was impossible, especially if that game could not be used to "play" Star Wars in a roundabout way. Star Frontiers would have been better off as a more generic science fiction game, just like D&D was, and pulled in pop-culture influences.

You could pull in various other classic science fiction works and base campaigns around those, such as Starship Troopers, Dune, The Forever War, War of the Worlds, Foundation, 1970s Star Wars and Alien, 80s Blade Runner, and too many others to mention.

An actual science fiction game like D&D would Appendix N all these sources and deliver that.

GURPS science fiction delivers on all those classic books and reflects a stronger foundation in those classics, while Star Frontiers is just one of them. As a result, basing a game "just on Star Frontiers" feels like it is missing something. What is missing are those classics.

Looking back on the 1980s, the game that delivered on the science fiction classics was the FGU's Space Opera. After this, we had GURPS Space, which still works well.

These days, we have the excellent Cepheus Universal (CU), which takes more modern science fiction stories and turns them into 2d6 games. Note that CU's inspirations lean more towards science fiction movies from the 1980s to today. If we are talking classic "book-based" science fiction from the 1950s to 1980, I would choose GURPS Space or Space Opera.

Star Wars in 1977 was the death of the classic science fiction book.

Star Frontiers is very much John Carter with Volturnus, so the roots of this game come from the pre-Star Wars era. If you wanted to make great Star Frontiers adventures, you would imitate classic science fiction books of the past, not copy movies from the 1980s to today. We did this in our 40-year Star Frontiers campaign; it was a mix of all the greats. We less copied Aliens and Blade Runner, and instead played these long-arc, sweeping campaigns where those larger issues of morality and humanity were reflected in "space dungeon" adventures.

This is still a project, but with tariffs throwing the world where I work upside down, I need to focus my energies and creativity carefully.